So let’s just get this out of the way: Sarah Palin is not only one of the Dumb, but Dumb Royalty. She’s a Queen of Dumb, with her folksy aw shucks-isms and half-misremembered facts and pure unadulterated bullshit, all in front of reality tv cameras that few seem capable of turning away from.

I mean, I really don’t see her appeal. And I’m from “Real America,” straight down to the three dairy farms on the road where I grew up.

Because she is Dumb. Not just willfully, but straight-up Dumb. (As opposed to Michelle Bachmann and Rick Perry, who appear to be more willfully Dumb than actually Dumb.)

So imagine my surprise to find out that when you set your decoder ring on ‘guano,’ Sarah Palin is actually saying some of the same things I have been saying about politics.

She made three interlocking points. First, that the United States is now governed by a “permanent political class,” drawn from both parties, that is increasingly cut off from the concerns of regular people. Second, that these Republicans and Democrats have allied with big business to mutual advantage to create what she called “corporate crony capitalism.” Third, that the real political divide in the United States may no longer be between friends and foes of Big Government, but between friends and foes of vast, remote, unaccountable institutions (both public and private).

That’s, um, difficult for a progressive punk rocker to disagree with.

“Do you want to know why nothing ever really gets done?” she said, referring to politicians. “It’s because there’s nothing in it for them. They’ve got a lot of mouths to feed — a lot of corporate lobbyists and a lot of special interests that are counting on them to keep the good times and the money rolling along.”

I mean, fuck; she’s not wrong. That is EXACTLY why nothing gets done.

I mean:

“This is not the capitalism of free men and free markets, of innovation and hard work and ethics, of sacrifice and of risk,” she said of the crony variety. She added: “It’s the collusion of big government and big business and big finance to the detriment of all the rest — to the little guys. It’s a slap in the face to our small business owners — the true entrepreneurs, the job creators accounting for 70 percent of the jobs in America.”

Don’t get me wrong, it’s difficult to not read those quotes in her overwrought squeak-accented cheerleader cadence and then simply dismiss it as sarcastic pandering to the downtrodden, but somehow reading it on the page… I mean, if I didn’t tell you it was Sarah Palin, you’d have never guessed. Never.

You’d have probably guessed I was throwing a curveball and trying to trip President Obama up with something Candidate Obama said.

But it’s Sarah Palin. The candidate who invented “death panels,” is qualified to be president because Russia is right over the border and can’t name a Supreme Court case other than Roe v. Wade with which she disagrees.

Go ahead, go back and re-read those quotes in your best Zach de la Rocha voice instead of Tina Fey’s, and they sound, you know… like the change we kind of hoped for.

Now, obviously I disagree greatly with Sarah Palin on the solutions to these issues and can never, ever support her to be anything more than a guest at the White House, but the idea that she could consider this whole anti-corporate thing an issue worth talking about puts her ahead of most of the candidates on either side.

So something tells me there is a wire crossed here, a context or something that is missing. I mean, there’s no way Sarah Palin is out there waving one of those Adbusters corporate america flags, especially given the policies she has supported – a much more realistic indicator of the type of Dumb she would unleash across this great nation.

But maybe that’s a language difference and there is common ground that can be found.

Then again, maybe the reporter is simply over-thinking Palin, with the hope of finding something more than the empty-headed celebutard she appears to be, and thus justifying all the attention we pay her.

Personally, I think this only further proves the theory that “Sarah Palin” is a performance artist a la Andy Kaufman or Borat, just fucking with us to see how far she can push it before we call her on it.

On June 17, 1972, five guys working for then-president Richard Nixon’s political henchmen (known as “the Plumbers” because they “plugged leaks”) broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington D.C. and fix the taps the Republicans had put on the Democrats’ phones during a previous break-in. The burglars were wearing blue surgical gloves and had their pockets stuffed with hundreds…

This time, however, a security guard noticed the tape the burglars had put across the latches of the locks on the doors and called the police.

The resulting scandal eventually forced Nixon to resign the presidency and slink back to California bathed in the stench of shame and flagrant assholery. It also gave rise to the now ubiquitous “-gate” ending for any and every political scandal and reinforced the journalist’s role as a watchdog for the people (thank you Woodward and Bernstein).

Four people were arrested on Monday for allegedly posing as telephone technicians and trying to tap the phones of Senator Mary Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, in her New Orleans office. […]

All four of the people arrested in New Orleans were charged with entering federal property under false pretenses with the intent of committing a felony. At least two of the four people were dressed in telephone company work clothes and construction hats when they were arrested.

go team! I guess those who fail to learn from history ARE doomed to repeat it.

“It’s time for Americans to realize that governing is hard work, and that a president can’t just wave a magic wand and fix everything,” said a letter from alleged Philadelphian Ellie Light, that was published in the Jan. 19 edition of The Philadelphia Daily News.A letter from Light in the Jan. 20 edition of the San Francisco Examiner concluded with an identical sentence, but with an address for Light all the way across the country in Daly City, California.

and then there were more. and more. and more. and then I found a new one (and another) (and another). I checked and organized links from the Cleveland Plain Dealer articles and the Paterrico posts (including the comments) to look at all this and get a sense of the unfolding story.

In Zimbabwe, most people cannot afford to buy a newspaper because of the hyperinflation and most people cannot afford an independent newspaper because of the “luxury tax” on the sale of imported newspapers, including The Zimbabwean, which is printed in South Africa for distribution in Zimbabwe.

To call attention to thew deplorable situation in Zimbabwe, TBWA\HUNT\LASCARIS collected trillions of dollars worth of worthless Zimbabwe currency to create billboards, flyers and wallpaper. The purpose of the campaign is to support The Zimbabwean newspaper which has been slapped by the Mugabe regime with a 55% luxury duty tax making the paper unaffordable to most citizens.

The campaign is running in England and South Africa where it is hoped people will buy the newspaper to support its ongoing coverage of the country’s plight.

West Seattle, home to the mayor and transportation chief Grace Crunican, received an inordinate amount of attention right before Christmas, records show. Ten employees spent a total of 76 hours over two days clearing sidewalks, landings and bus stops in West Seattle, with the largest crew dispatched to the Admiral district where Mayor Greg Nickels and Deputy Mayor Tim Ceis live.

No such emphasis was accorded other neighborhoods, although special attention was given to the private Lakeside School in Northeast Seattle, where a truck sprayed de-icer around the grounds, and a loop of streets in Laurelhurst that were plowed even though they’re not among the city’s list of priorities for snow cleaning, according to department records…

Transportation crews described confusion and delays in dispatching plows when the snow first began falling, making it harder to stay on top of the game. Meanwhile, the records show trucks hopscotching around the city, attending to special requests or remaining idle while the city announced it was plowing “aggressively” and clearing main routes that residents swore had yet to see a plow.

The story is fantastic and complete and a serious indictment of the wastes, excesses and abuses of government that only a newspaper can provide. Reporters reviewed more than 2,000 documents in order to put together this piece. Let’s see a blogger or TV station pull that off.

But even in this incredibly pessimistic piece, the Times stumbles across the great truth, but still somehow misses the main point:

The Tribune Company, for instance, owner of The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and other papers, filed for bankruptcy in December, largely because of its debt load. The reality is that even though the economic climate is hard for newspapers, without their debt payments the publishers in bankruptcy would still make money, as do most newspapers around the country.

Now the outlook is by no means good, as the next couple paragraphs point out, but the general problem is not the business model itself, but the fact that it was being run by greedy screwheads who just kept gobbling up all the little profitable city papers and lumping them under one giant multi-national media empire run not by newspaper people, but bean counters more interested in lining their pockets and keeping the giant beast fed.

So they trimmed the newsroom and started sharing content among the whole chain. No need for every paper to cover an event when one guy can do it for the whole company.

Then, with the total homogenization of news and the newspapers’ fear of television, combined with the constant attempt to copy the TV news style of more headlines with less news, readers began to realize that their paper offered them very little that they couldn’t get from other sources.

When newspaper people stopped running the industry, the newspapers lost focus and forgot how to be newspapers.